Making Youth Homeless: Ethical Dilemmas in Establishing Trust in the State

Background: Since the first publication of Michael Lipsky’s foundational text, social work scholarship has attended to the critical role of Street Level Bureaucrats (SLBs) in the implementation of social welfare policy. Specifically, social work scholarship and pedagogy has been attuned to the role of discretion as a critical dimension of this work. However, while Lipsky’s analysis has proved helpful for understanding how practitioners confront resource scarcity, it does little to account for how these workers and their clients navigate whether and how to trust in resources that are available. This study asks, how do frontline SLBs navigate ethical dilemmas inherent in establishing trust between their clients and state systems of care in which they have also experienced harm?

Methods: This presentation draws on data from over two years of ethnographic research at an LGBTQ+ youth center working to design, build, and implement housing programs tailored to LGBTQ+ youth in Detroit, Michigan. This research involved dozens of in-depth interviews with key staff members and extensive participant-observation in organizational activities – including shadowing housing case managers in their work to recruit and enroll young people, ages 15-25, in permanent supportive housing. My study examines the dilemmas that emerged in a program designed to serve people-in-community, but forced, under restrictive federal, state, and local eligibility requirements, to serve community members as atomized individuals. Ethnographic data from this study, including interview transcripts, ethnographic fieldnotes, and archival documents, were analyzed using an iterative, inductive approach, informed by grounded theory.

Results: This study reveals a persistent ethical dilemma inherent in social workers’ efforts to recruit and enroll LGBTQ+ youth into supportive housing: while these social workers and the architects with which they partnered emphasized their aspiration to serve youth within entire chosen family systems, housing case managers found themselves, in order to establish eligibility, tasked with severing or obscuring ties – on paper or in actually – between young people and their chosen, created, and even biological kin. Social work in this context involves a central paradox: that workers must “make youth homeless” in order to get them housed. Moreover, this work involves not only technical skills to collect records, complete paperwork, and navigate complex housing policy, but also the ability to make profoundly consequential ethical decisions, often without sufficient evidence, in real time with their clients.

Conclusions: Ultimately, social workers caught in this paradox – tasked with making youth homeless in order to get them housed – expressed ambivalence at the prospect of eliciting trust in a system apt to betray that trust. This ambivalence did not involve SLBs’ use of discretion under the constraints of inadequate resources and service rationing mandates, as classic scholarship on street-level bureaucracy might suggest, but ethical ambivalence about whether and how to build trust in available resources, under the present conditions. These findings suggest the need to expand social work training in ethical decision-making, with implications not only for those working with LGBTQ+ youth, but for all social work practitioners working in systems with the potential to cause harm.